Measuring frontend performance

As a frontend developer, I deal with performance issues every single day. Let's see how it is possible to get an initial picture of frontend performances.

Measuring frontend performances can be very difficult, as there are too many factors involved. This article does not claim to offer the ultimate solution to such a hard problem. Please consider this as a starting point for your studies and insights.

Every time I write a new feature which involves javscript or massive css code, I need to check how much that piece of code impacts performances.

While I was searching for a tool which could retrieve some information about page load timings, I found the great phantomas. This tools is able to collect a huge amount of data regarding a specific URL. Bingo!

The workflow

So, here is how I take advantage of git (are you using git, do you? ) and phantomas to get an idea of how much weird is my code in terms of performances:

I always start from a clean repository

I collect backend and frontend timing metrics

I write my super fancy feature which involves javascript or a lot of css code

With git I can easly get to know what are the modifications I am doing